Cranking It Up with Sunline's Crank FC

Total Score: 8.08 - GREAT

Introduction: When it comes to fluorocarbon fishing line, there are few manufacturers that can rival the catalog of options offered by Sunline. From Shooter to Sniper to Assassin and various leader options, Sunline has a fluorocarbon product to suit a host of different fishing styles and budgets. Now the manufacturer even has specialized fluorocarbon for flipping and cranking. Today we take a look at one of those products. Here's an in-depth look at Sunline's Crank FC.

Introducing Sunline's Crank FC

Quality : Sunline's Crank FC (for some reason, I keep referring to it as FC Crank), comes in familiar clear plastic Sunline packaging. It is a very unassuming packaging belying the fact this is actually a quality fluorocarbon product.

This line features Sunline's proprietary P-Ion treatment giving the line a very slick and smooth surface while supposedly increasing resistance to abrasion.

Stripping a section of line off the spool and running it through my fingers, I can sense a small inconsistencies in shape that's probably a result of the non-precision wound nature of the filler spool. I need to stress, this is very slight.

A close-up look at Crank FC on the filler spool

Measuring out along this length of line at five different spots reveals quite a different result as the average deviation in the line's diameter along these random points was 0.38% (average across the fluorocarbon lines in our FPI is 0.989%). Taking the mean of these five values, we get a measurement 0.289 millimeters for Crank FC at 12lb test. Sunline's published diameter is 0.285 millimeters. That's very consistent, and of course, as advertised, the surface of this line is indeed very slick.

Out in the sun, the amber color is more difficult to detect

Performance: I was a little surprised by the line's initial quality and took the next step of introducing Crank FC to The Machine where we took some tensile and knot strength measurements along with stretch and abrasion resistance calibrations all in an effort to determine the line's FPI (fluorocarbon performance index). In a big picture, overall score, Sunline's Crank FC scored above average at 54.9 (compared to an average of score of 48.2 across all our test subjects) telling us it's a very good fluorocarbon line product.

Still, initial quality and lab results are never enough for us when it comes to fishing line so of course, I acquired several spools of this line in different ratings and fished them on a few different combos over the course of the last year to see how it handled. As fluorocarbon fishing lines go, Crank FC is very easy handling in both casting and pitching. It does not have the typical tendency of higher end fluorocarbons to jump off the spool.